Microsoft Introduces ‘Frontier Firms’ as a Framework for AI Success
In the keynote session, Althoff spoke about Microsoft’s success framework — first introduced earlier this year — which leads organizations through an AI journey to become “Frontier Firms.” “These companies are deeply focused on enriching the employee experience, hiring the best talent, nurturing that talent and equipping them with the world's best tools. AI is infused into the way they work, tying it back to measurable KPIs on the business so that they can see real impact in the results that they strive to achieve.”
Althoff explained that “Frontier Firms are ruthlessly focused on making sure that they see the results in the customer experience journey. It’s about real-time engagement with customers. It’s about making sure that they have connections, better relationships with customers, so that at the end of the day, they achieve better results with a better cost structure.”
To accomplish these results, however, Althoff said organizations must reshape business processes. “You can’t simply apply technology to an existing process and expect revolutionary results. You have to comprehensively look left to right to see how a business process can become AI-first and truly be changed to impact the business.”
Finally, in Microsoft’s vision of a successful AI journey, a Frontier Firm must focus deeply on innovation so they can drive real competitive advantage in the industries that they serve, Althoff said. “Whether it’s advances in material science or drug discovery or simply writing code faster than you’ve ever written it before, there’s no question that putting AI to work for your competitive advantage is the right approach.”
DIVE DEEPER: Agentic artificial intelligence is changing the future of work.
AI Moves Into Its Agentic Era With Microsoft’s Latest Innovations
Asha Sharma, president of CoreAI Product at Microsoft, shared how the company is enabling its customers to leverage agentic AI with new offerings.
As part of its long list of announcements at Microsoft Ignite, the company featured key products designed to advance the productive and profitable adoption of agentic AI. The offerings include Work IQ, which Microsoft describes as “the intelligence layer that enables Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents to make connections, unlock insights and predict the next best action based on native integrations. Built on your data, memory and inference, it connects to the rich company knowledge in your emails, files, meetings and chats, plus your preferences, habits, work patterns and relationships.”
Fabric IQ brings together data with operational systems “under one shared model tied to business meaning. This gives customers a live, connected view of their business, so both people and AI can act in real time,” according to Microsoft.
Sharma said Foundry IQ, which was also introduced at the event, “is the intelligent connection point across all of your structured and unstructured knowledge that your agents rely on and take action on. This is the first large-scale implementation of context engineering, extending RAG built for agents. And unlike traditional RAG, Foundry IQ doesn’t just retrieve; it plans, it reasons and it iterates across Work IQ, Fabric IQ, blog storage, the web and more.”
Finally, the company announced in a Nov. 18 blog post, “Microsoft Agent Factory is a program that brings these agent IQ layers together to help organizations build agents with confidence. With a single metered plan, customers can start building with IQ using Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio. They can deploy their agents anywhere, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, with no upfront licensing and provisioning required. Eligible organizations can also tap into hands-on support from top AI Forward Deployed Engineers and access tailored role-based training to boost AI fluency across teams.”
WATCH: Agentic AI introduces new security concerns around identity and access management.
How To Innovate Securely With Agentic AI
While agentic AI is poised to deliver increased productivity and profitability, it’s critical to think about securing those agents. And doing so requires new considerations around cybersecurity.
During the opening keynote, Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s president of business apps and agents, noted the new ways in which bad actors have started targeting AI agents. “You need tools that understand these new threats. At Microsoft, we’re extending our existing security capabilities that we have for identities supporting over a billion users a day, as well as a million and a half customers to make them support agents too.”
“This includes threat protection from Defender, identity from Entra and data security from Purview, and it’s all fueled by threat intelligence from over 100 trillion signals every single day,” Lamanna said. “And all of these shared security primitives have been woven into Agent 365 to seamlessly protect both people and agents.”
According to Lamanna, “Microsoft Security helps make your agents enterprise-ready with minimal effort. The idea is that you can become a Frontier Firm with Copilot and agents directed by human ambition to go transform every part of your organization. And all of this needs to be secured and observable at every layer of the stack, and that’s where Agent 365, Foundry Control Plane and more come in.”
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